Between Wars, Between Identities I - Polish Jews and Jewish Poles
Illustration Credit: Georgia Ryan
In his column ‘Between Wars, Between Identities’, Sam Rubinstein explores key issues of early twentieth-century Ashkenazi Jewish poetry, including antisemitism in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust, literary debates over the use of local vernaculars in Jewish poetry and expression, and Jewish nationalism and the beginnings of the Zionist movement. In this first column, he takes a look at the divide in Polish Jewish literary circles over language choice, and how key actors reconciled language with their evolving identities.
Mieczysław Braun was prepared to die for Poland, the land in which he was born. In 1920, he fought for the Second Polish Republic in the Polish-Soviet War, and after the victory of his country was assured, he studied law at the University of Warsaw. Although he spent most of his life in Łódź, it was in Warsaw, where he had once lived as a student, that he lost his life. ‘Braun’ was an inconspicuous shortening of ‘Bronstein’, and he died of typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.
It was Braun who sent out the first call-to-arms to Polish-Jewish poets. In 1924, he complained in Nowe Žycie that ‘we have very few Polish-Jewish poets, and those who exist carefully avoid Jewish topics out of fear of betraying their own Jewish origin or reminding their readers of it’. Braun’s lament (if indeed it is to be interpreted as a lament) was redressed by a range of literary talent: Jews who, rather than hiding their Jewishness in their writing, put it front and centre; Poles who saw the bitter poignancy of Jewish themes as a worthy subject for their verse. The call was answered by Roman Brandstaetter and Maurycy Szymel.
The two had much in common. Both longed for the day that Jews would return to their Promised Land in Palestine. For Brandstaetter, this meant that ‘Polish-Jewish poetry’ was an unfortunate consequence of a historical tragedy: the condemnation of the Jews to live in diaspora. He anticipated that his poems would one day be cast aside by Jews, who would no longer have any use for them, or even understand the language in which they were written: ‘when the nation of free Hebrews on Palestinian soil will exchange ideas in the biblical language of their forefathers, we [i.e., Polish-Jewish poets] may become a sad relict of the diaspora’. It was wrong, thought Brandstaetter, that Jews should have to express themselves in a strange Slavic tongue. Hebrew, he argued, was the ‘biblical language of [our] forefathers’, the language most appropriate for the expression of Jewish identity.
Szymel rejected Brandstaetter’s ‘linguistic chauvinism’: ‘the Jewish spirit speaks in all languages of the world’, he wrote in 1933. ‘Jewish masses, the real, concrete Jewish nation, do not express their will in Hebrew, but sing, cry, and yearn in other languages’ – in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Ladino, even Esperanto (to which Braun was partial). So Szymel made no apology for writing three of his anthologies in Polish, and one in Yiddish. He still believed that Jewish life in Poland was rather melancholy, and that Jews ought to aspire to their own statehood in Palestine. In one of his best poems, O staruszku tęskniacym (About the Old Man Longing), an old Jew feels suffocated by the oppressive foreignness of Catholic Poland, his native land. His only escape is to close his eyes and to yearn for Zion, his true home. Szymel feels some cool affection for Poland: at the end of Elegia do ziemi polskiej (Elegy for the Polish Land) he gives thanks to Casimir, the medieval king who permitted Jewish settlement. But the problem, for Szymel, is that Poland is not his land:
‘Oczom moim wybaczysz, że się oderwać nie mogły / Od innej, dalekiej ziemi, do której może – nie wrócę’
(‘You will forgive my eyes for not losing sight / of a different, faraway land, to which I might not return’).
He simply refused to take the step taken by Brandstaetter, who saw Polish as an inappropriate vessel for the expression of Jewishness.
Indeed, in time , Brandstaetter followed the implications of this belief to its logical conclusion: that his own ‘Polish-Jewish identity’ was not sustainable. Polishness and Jewishness, he thought, were fundamentally at odds with one another. Anyone who tries to reconcile the two – like Szymel, perhaps – will end up being ‘torn between two cultures and typically brought up in the borderland between cultural assimilation and a shallow Jewishness’. Brandstaetter had no desire to abandon Polishness, but nor did he wish to be a ‘shallow Jew’. And so he chose, and as best he could, to be (or to become) a Pole.
The first step was to convert to Catholicism, which Brandstaetter duly did while a refugee in Mandatory Palestine, shortly before his dream of a Hebrew-speaking Jewish state was realised in 1948. He then moved on to Rome, and married a Polish Catholic, Regina Wiktor, with whom he remained for the rest of his life. Between 1967 and 1973 he wrote his magnum opus, a four-part novel which he named after another Jew who had been baptised in Palestine, one more palatable to his fellow Poles: Jezus z Nazaretu (Jesus of Nazareth). To emphasise his Catholic turn, he composed a work in 1976 dedicated to St Francis of Assisi. He wrote regularly for the Cracovian Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, until he died aged 81, in 1987.
Maurycy Szymel’s belief in a ‘Polish-Jewish poetry’, in contrast, did not falter. He had studied Polish philology at the University of Warsaw, and found it apt to express his Jewish thoughts and anxieties in his vernacular. He felt strongly that the Polish language belonged to him as much as it belonged to ethnic Poles. To signal his loyalty to Polishness, and his desire to reconcile it with his Jewishness, he always signed his poems ‘Maurycy Szymel’ rather than the Yiddish form, ‘Moshe Schimmel’. But questions of orthography meant little to the Nazis, and he died in the Janowska Concentration Camp in 1942, when he was only 39 years old.
After 1939, the raging literary debate over ‘Polish-Jewish poetry’ ceased to matter; introspective questions of ‘identity’ were no longer relevant when Jews were identified as such not by themselves, but by the oppressive authorities. Brandstaetter was always conscious of the fact that, although he could escape the trappings of Jewish religion, he could never escape his ethnic Jewishness, no matter how much he wanted to, and that – had he not escaped to Palestine in the nick of time – he, like Szymel, would most probably have been killed by the Nazis. With hindsight, the literary debate over ‘Polish-Jewish poetry’, on which Szymel and Brandstaetter took opposing sides, was a luxury, and a powerful emblem of the intellectual vibrancy of Jewish life in Poland on the eve of its destruction.